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The European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) project "Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Ready for Preparedness of Oil Spills - UReady4OS" started on January 1st, 2014 and will last for 24 months. The project belongs to actions aimed at improving cross border civil protection and marine pollution cooperation, including regional cooperation, regarding preparedness for, a direct response to and reducing consequences of natural and man-made disasters, including the consequences of CBRN events.

Project Consortium consists of 4 partners: Polytechnic University of Cartagena (Spain)-coordinator, University of Cyprus (Cyprus), University of Porto (Portugal) and University of Zagreb-FER-LABUST (Croatia).

The general aim of this project is to join forces to make available to European Civil Protection a fleet of
autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) with operational capability to intervene against oil spills in European Seas using new cooperative multivehicle robotic technologies. Surface oil is not the only effect of an oil spill. Underwater oil plumes can come from bottom leaks and from surface patches forming subsurface plumes as recently been brought into the public eye during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident. This approach will allow us to use relatively low-cost standard sonar and oil-in water sensors, with novel advanced algorithms to get the most out these devices. The distributed intelligence of these devices across the spill will then be able to build up a highly accurate and dynamic image of the spill. The robotic system will also be able to self-organise to improve the monitoring of the oil spill. Ultimately, this cooperating multivehicle robotic technology will allow a cheap, flexible, expandable, precise and rapid decision support system for Civil Protection decision makers by increasing the response time before the oil reaches the coast.